Messing Up - Part of the Design Process

This weeks blog was to be a £10 digital camera tear down and rebuild into a Kite Aerial Photography (KAP) rig. I'd found this super cheap digital camera at Sainsbury in Derby called the Vivitar Vivi Cam 7020 that was less than a tenner. I took to it with gusto at the Thursday night hack at the Bristol Hackspace.

ViviCam 7020

After removing the 5 case screws including the one hidden under the QC sticker then dropping one on the floor never to be found again, I managed to pop the casing off this incredibly cheap (in build and cost) digital camera.

Further dismantling showed that weights had actually been added to the camera to make it feel... well more like a camera?!

I located the shutter button and proceeded to try and workout how to activate it using an external switch on the little controller circuit I'd made from a plan by Limor Fried  that makes any cheapo camera into a time-lapse device.

Unfortunately to test the camera in it's unmade state I needed power and the batteries weren't going to stay in place without the casing so I reach for the Bristol Hackspace power supply. Things unravelled fast from this point. I must admit I failed to note which knob was current and which was voltage before whacking the wrong ones up to full power and probably frying this tiny flimsy camera.

A rapid reassembly and a borrowed SD card (for this little camera needs one to work possibly) would only produce little beeping sounds. I'd done something terrible and irreparable.

I disassembled and reassembled a few times. At first I thought it might be because I'd left a few screws out and these screws had part of the copper substrate from the circuit board connected to them.  Adding these in made no difference. The camera was just dead. Toast.

Though I must admit I felt a tiny bit frustrated I did feel I was adding to the long tradition of "DOING THINGS WRONG" that is at the heart of all tinkering and boffinry. I feel society (and perhaps it always has) dusts over the stories of failure and likes to laugh at them if they are told at all. But in my experience All truly good making has it measure of failure, mishap and just down-right buggering things up. I'm not suggesting this should happen, but we mustn't be afraid of it. I can think of so many exciting and promising projects that myself and others have started and never finished because they didn't go right the first time. In UK Government project we use something called Optimism Bias. It's where we add a % to the time and cost of any project because it is (and this came as a surprise to me) human nature to be overly optimistic. We too should be taught this from an early age in school or wherever. Maybe that's the true role of a Hackspace. Come here to Make... MAKE MISTAKES!

A wise man once said to me "If you're not making mistakes... You're not making ANYTHING!" Just to emphasis this here are two pre-Secret Life Of Machines (SLOM) films of Tim Hunkin where I think it's quite clear that the UK's premier Hacker makes a few errors as he goes along.

and this one from slightly later...

I managed to take the camera back to Sainsbury for a full refund (thank you Sainsbury) unfortunately the branch of Sainsbury I took it took don't sell this camera so I had to have a cash refund rather than an exchange which will hold up my adventures in KAP for a little longer, though I admit my appetite for it has increased since the recent trip to Southwold. In the meantime look at this phenomenal picture taken by David Steward of Bristol Hackspace. It's called a light painting using LEDs on a long stick that flash in sequence as you walk slowly along infront of a very long exposure camera.

Logo photo by David Stewart Bristol Hackspace using light painting stick with Arduino

David Stewart actually refocused the camera closer to the action after this first picture. It wasn't clear in the small view finder on the camera what a great effect the light reflecting off the cobble sets was. These sort of pictures are sort of spooky, in an arty way they make me think of how something last through time, like the very old wall in the background whilst other things (the people in the pictures) are fleeting. Yeah... I know right?!